TikTok Reportedly Hid Videos Posted By Disabled Users From The World

On Monday, it was reported that TikTok, the world's fast-growing musical video platform, hid videos posted by the disabled, and videos created by overweight as well as LGBTQ people. The information was revealed by a German site called Netzpolitik, which cited an internal source and leaked documents. Accordingly, regardless of the content of the videos, the platform marked them as being uploaded by vulnerable users that could potentially be bullied.

The report said that this moderation rule is titled “Imagery depicting a subject highly vulnerable to cyberbullying.”

Moderators even put some users in the “not recommend” category, including those with Down syndrome, autism, and facial disfigurement, as reported by Netzpolitik. Due to how they are categorized, these users can only be seen by some thousand people instead of millions of users around the world.

According to TikTok, this policy was temporary that has been removed. The company initially imposed this rule while it was building its team as well as carrying out protective measures to tackle the cyberbullying trend that aimed at certain users.

A spokesperson of TikTok told CNET that the company had a good intention but conducted from a wrong approach and that it has changed that policy for a long time now to have better in-app protections as well as more effective anti-bullying policies.

The report in question comes out following the apology TikTok made last week for the confusion and interest around a video against Chinese that went viral. In that video, a young user of this platform posted a makeup video, in which they were also raising awareness about the community of Uighur Muslims that was detained in China. on Wednesday, TikTok said that the firm wanted clarification and to send an apology for the human error in taking down that video.

TikTok, since its launch, has got over 1.5 billion downloads for its app, ever-growing as a social network for short musical videos. The platform is also being investigated by the United States due to national security concerns.